Publication Date:
2005-07-26
Description:
Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas have expanded in recent decades, accompanied by large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along with considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. We face the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Foley, Jonathan A -- Defries, Ruth -- Asner, Gregory P -- Barford, Carol -- Bonan, Gordon -- Carpenter, Stephen R -- Chapin, F Stuart -- Coe, Michael T -- Daily, Gretchen C -- Gibbs, Holly K -- Helkowski, Joseph H -- Holloway, Tracey -- Howard, Erica A -- Kucharik, Christopher J -- Monfreda, Chad -- Patz, Jonathan A -- Prentice, I Colin -- Ramankutty, Navin -- Snyder, Peter K -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Jul 22;309(5734):570-4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin, 1710 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53726, USA. jfoley@wisc.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16040698" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Agriculture
;
Air Pollution
;
Animals
;
Animals, Wild
;
Climate
;
Communicable Diseases/epidemiology/transmission
;
*Conservation of Natural Resources
;
*Ecosystem
;
*Environment
;
Fresh Water
;
Human Activities
;
Humans
;
Policy Making
;
Trees
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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